The (Likely Briefly) Successful Kludges of Nogglestead

Gentle reader, I have successfully triumphed over a small broken appliance with a successful hack.

A couple of years ago, we bought a little cordless handheld vacuum commonly known as a Dust Buster no matter who makes them, although ours does happen to be a dustbuster® by Black + Decker. I used it to vacuum up the little bits of wood that shook off of firewood on the bricks before my fireplace every day. It’s the kind where you have to hold the power button to make it work. And it worked for about a year when it suddenly stopped. Pushing the button would not engage the motor and the suction even after charging the device for a long time.

So it languished on a side desk in my office for over a year, as things do (as you know, gentle reader!) until I recently cleared off that desk–well, I didn’t clear it, but I did remove the dustbuster® and a flashlight that’s not working–and took the things to my workbench. Which has had a blocker project on it for a couple of months. The blocker project is not the lamp–I’ve moved that, yet incomplete five years later, to a different desk in the garage. It’s a bed tray that I was hoping to do some découpage with, but I ran into a little snag painting it and just… left it there for later, which is even later from now.

With a little time to kill available to me on a Sunday afternoon, so I set aside the blocker project (perhaps for five years or more) and opened the device up to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.

When I opened the shell, I could see it was a simple device. A battery, a charging plug, a pressure switch, and a simple motor turning a plastic rotor.

Given that it was a power switch required pressure to keep it on, I thought perhaps the external switch was not contacting the internal switch, so I pressed it tighter, and the motor ran.

I did, however, see a little spark at the top of the battery from time to time, and my original theory proved incorrect. Essentially, the little bit of metal attached to the top of the battery had come loose. When the dustbuster® lie on its back and when I pressed on it, I guess the battery was close enough that it touched or the electricity could jump the gap, but it was definitely broken apart. The battery was not in a housing where you could swap them out. It was hard-wired into the system. Or it should have been.

Now I suppose, gentle reader, I could have soldered the lead back onto the battery. One of the pyrography tools I have, the nicer one, has a soldering tip and came with some solder–and I might have another kit somewhere–but I have never soldered anything in my life, successfully or no, and I didn’t want to try and to fail on a Sunday afternoon with what would be the defining moment or capstone of my weekend.

So, instead, I got a couple of rubber bands, and….

Well, I make that sound so easy: I grabbed a couple of rubber bands, as though Nogglestead has a drawer full of them. Now, you might think this is the case, and it might well be–I have not opened some drawers in years, and I am not sure I would have noticed rubber bands on instances where I have opened some of the more esoteric drawers looking for a luggage tag or the driver’s side mirror of a 1986 Geo Storm. I mean, it’s not like the collection of 3.5″ discs from my first 286 circa 1991. I know which drawer holds those.

So I went looking for rubber bands. We don’t get nor use rubber bands a lot here at Nogglestead. It’s not like we’ve had need to buy a bag of them. Mostly, they come to us on rare occasions when the postal service sees fit to put a rubber band around a stack of our mail. Or our accountant will sometimes band our files or filings together. But we’re getting only a single hands’ counting of rubber bands annually. I put them in the little box of paper clips, which I also glean from filings our accountants sends us, but I recently discarded several as my beautiful wife was concerned the kittens might take them from the box and choke on them. But I found a rubber band under the paper clips, and I started back out to the garage with it, when the rubber band of unknown provenance and age broke. I went back to my office and found two more which appeared more supple. I know I am running on, but I want to give you a sense of how much actual moving back and forth from the actual opposite ends of my home I had to do to to acomplish this simple repair.

Where was I? Probably going up and down the stairs.

So I looped the rubber bands around the battery to ensure that the lead remains in contact with the battery. As I mounted it into its the plastic body, I had to re-weave the rubber bands a bit, but it held. And when I got the screws in and pressed the power switch, it worked.

So I have a working dustbuster® again. At least until the rubber bands snap or until I jostle it so that the lead is no longer in contact with the battery. But I feel clever for an afternoon.

Also, I am now thinking about how easy it would be to unscrew the housing and reverse the rotor on the motor so that the dustbuster® blows instead of sucks. But I don’t have many friends in real life to whom I could try this. Just a coincidence, I suppose.

Also, sorry I don’t have pictures like a proper Internet how-to, but I was eager to try it out (it worked! as I mentioned) but then I am too afraid that if I open it up again to see the magnificent harp of Icantsolder will lose its magic.